Neu!

Neu!: Klaus Dinger (guitar, banjo, drums); Michael Rother (guitar, acoustic & electric basses).
Recorded in Germany in 1971.
One of the most influential of the multitudes who flew the Krautrock banner in the early 1970s, Neu! defined their own subgenre, known as "motorik," whose urgent repetitions are redolent of traveling at high speeds down Germany's Autobahn highway. The minimalist structure and unrelenting intensity of their self-titled debut album (also known as NEU! 1) had a direct effect on everyone from the Fall to Stereolab; the Neu! influence in modern rock is so pervasive that it's often taken for granted. But hearing the intersection of the choppy, heavily processed guitars; the monomaniacal, locomotive rhythms; and the Velvet Underground-in-outer-space modal format of the mostly instrumental songs, one realizes that the subsequent decades of rock music would have sounded significantly different if this album had never existed.